Hi On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 11:01:38PM +0200, Jose Guzman wrote: > I am going to take a course on computational neuroscience soon. Tutors > suggested us to use xppaut (or similar) to solve ODEs. Since I am a > little bit more familiar with Sage, I was wondering if I could simply > use Sage in stead of xppaut. I would really appreciate if somebody with > experience in xppaut and/or Sage would give me some ideas about the > advantages/disadvantages of xppaut versus Sage . Until now, I did not > have any necessity to solve ODEs, so I cannot judge very much if it is > really worthy to move to xppaut.
I am not a regular ODE solver, but I run science software for the last seven years for academics and scientists. xppaut has always been very fast at DE solving, and there are often problems (practically) unsolvable or at least uncomparable on other tools like python libraries, octave, even matlab! It has an older X11 interface, looks like tcl/tk or something with irritating cursor/cut/paste behaviour and an odd windowing system. If your focus is getting the DE solved, the investment in learning time is well worth it. The language is actually not complicated. (Note it is not currently packaged for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid, but you can probably get the source and compile it easily, or try the 9.10 karmic package directly, as it only depends on libc6 an X11.) There is pydde, pydelay, SAGE, scipy.integrate.odeint, for someone familiar with python. You may not be able to solve all problems from your course in SAGE, but the community would sure appreciate some ODE documentation and examples, if you could do this in parallel. It would also in the longer term lead to ODE / PDE / DDE functionality in sage improving, especially if shortcomings were clearly highlighted. How about an XPPAUT-SAGE dictionary? regards, Jan -- .~. /V\ Jan Groenewald /( )\ www.aims.ac.za ^^-^^ -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
